A blog of Bridge Environment, updated weekly on Thursdays, travel permitting.
Bridge Environment seeks to catalyze a cultural shift in how our society addresses environmental issues. We provide relevant and unbiased advice to any interested party, and also work to educate scientists, policy makers, and the public on how to have a more informative dialog over environmental issues.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Launch of Bridge Environment

Today, we launch Bridge
Environment--a project of the Ocean Foundation. This
organization represents my effort to balance interests and abilities that span
three important disciplines. I started my career as a marine ecologist with a
burning desire to make my science useful. Pursuing that goal has taught me a
lot about policy making, about the use of science, and frankly, about humility.
In the process, I have gained extensive experience in environmental policy and
economics through sweat, some sorrow, and a lot of serendipity.

Luck found me as I began to
generate results from my first project--design principles for marine protected
areas--just as the marine conservation community discovered this management
tool. Though the demand for my expertise was deeply satisfying, I found that
groups and governments were often unwilling to roll up their sleeves and do the
hard work of crafting thoughtful policies. I also noticed that scientific
advisers, myself included, were often complicating the process by confounding
the insight science could provide with their own values, but even more frequently
by avoiding values altogether such that their advice was not relevant to the
important questions over which policymakers and the public struggled.

Ever since, I have striven to make
science more useful by adapting my efforts and outlook. Early on, I had a chance
to learn some lessons about managing fisheries from a rocket scientist--Bruce Bollermann--who
designs missile guidance systems for a living. My work with Bruce helped me
realize the central role that uncertainty plays in our attitudes about
fisheries regulations and environmental policies in general. This realization
inspired me to go back to graduate school to study the psychology of
decision-making via the fields of behavioral, environmental, and public
economics. Behavioral economics, in particular, has focused on how people
perceive and respond to uncertainty. It turns out that our brain wiring is at
least part of the explanation for why debates surrounding most environmental
issues seem alike. The psychology of negotiation also plays a role as people
have a hard time negotiating effectively when they mistrust the other party.
People are unlikely to offer up some sacrifice of their own if they doubt their
opponent is meeting them halfway.

Many people believe we can use
science more effectively when crafting environmental policy. We believe a major
step towards this goal is to make science more useful. Doing so requires more
effort into building bridges between the policy world and the worlds of
ecological and economic science. In making these connections, Bridge
Environment aims to catalyze a cultural shift in how our society addresses
environmental issues.

If our work catches your interest,
please consider following this blog, keeping an eye on our website,
and supporting our work with your thoughts, energy, and financial contributions.
I promise future blogs will provide more stories, both funny and sad, that
describe the origins of my views and the interesting situations and work
opportunities they have made possible. If you have thoughts on our work,
positive or negative, we would love to hear from you.